2
Sport and Community/Communitas
Alan G. Ingham and Mary G. McDonald
INTRODUCTION
Sport, for the most part, finds its location in ordinary culture —it is either
recreational or, for want of a better term, representational. Given the variable
nature of recreational, that is, primarily participatory sports, we shall say little
about them in this chapter.1 By representational, we refer to organized competitive sports (amateur or professional) that in various ways act as what Emile
Durkheim (1965) called representations collectives, signifiers of we-ness, ways
in which the group conceives of itself in its relations with objects that affect it,
and sources of social solidarity. As an object with which we identify, an athlete
or a sports team defines as a “community” all those who relate to the object
cathectically or in a possessive manner—our athlete, our team—and who introject the “representation” into their self-definitions (I am a *** fan; I wanna be
like Mike [ Jordan]).
In today’s media-saturated, virtual society, members of representational
sport “communities” do not necessarily inhabit a shared geophysical space. Fans
can form symbolic “communities” in distantiated relational space. One way that
this is accomplished is through communications technologies. For example, enthusiasts of the Atlanta baseball franchise can identify with their team even if
they do not live in the city of Atlanta, Georgia. This identification is most notably enabled by the “sport/media complex” (see Jhally, 1989) and, in the case of
the Atlanta team, by the Turner broadcasting conglomerate. The identification
with a team in distantiated relational space might seem a rather privatized
emotional activity. Lest we forget, Internet technologies now allow some privileged members of the collectivity to share their passions via cyberspace and to
discuss all aspects of the Atlanta team. In Europe, the fanzine also assists in
this endeavor. In turn, media and Internet technologies may influence the composition of the audience at the event. For example, Manchester United, the
English soccer champions, have been represented in virtual reality (by SkyTel,
Some portions of this chapter are modified extractions from the work of Ingham,
Howell, and Schilperoort (1987).
17
18
SPORT AND COMMUNITY/COMMUNITAS
which not only televises their games but also has infused money into the premier league) across Europe and Scandinavia. Moreover, the “club” has foreign
stars on its roster. As a result of these tendencies, as well as the relatively recent requirement for all-seater stadia, the traditional spectators of the 1950s,
working-class “caps” who stood in the terraces and petit bourgeois “trilbies”
who sat in the stands, have been replaced by a more multicultural, affluent formation. If one does not possess a season ticket, it is almost impossible to obtain
entrance to the events at Old Trafford (paying the “scalper” being the obvious
exception). In short, new media technologies and changes in league rules concerning the acquisition of foreign players have their political-economic consequences. Regardless of whether we are talking about the European premier
leagues or the North American major leagues, many fans are being priced out
of the primary consumer role, yet the opportunities for secondary and tertiary
consumption (see Loy, 1968) are expanding.
Thus while representational sport allows for the creation of particular
forms of “community” anchored in the popular, cross-class alliances are formed
around the collective representation in terms of support and fandoms, but not
necessarily in terms of how this support is organized, celebrated, and understood (see Hornby, 1992; Lewis, 1992). The process of identification is not
only mediated by biography, social differentiation, and stratification but also
has significant consequences for the geophysical and affectual space of the city.
For this reason, we place in double quotation marks the concept of “community.” It is a matter of debate as to how solidaristic the coalition or community
really is vis-à-vis its sporting icons.
In this chapter we attempt to theorize the relationship between representational sports and their proximal and distantiated consumer “communities”
rather than to provide numerous empirical examples. Our analysis begins with
a brief discussion of the various political and social histories which, in their critiques of capitalist relations, have anticipated the tendency for nostalgia within
rationalized capitalist societies.
ON COMMUNITY
The concept of community has a long history, but we begin our definitions in
the work of Ferdinand Tonnies (1957). His concepts of Gemeinschaft and
Gesellschaft (community and society) stand at the heart of sociological commentaries concerning the social costs of modernization. As ideal types, they
contrast the relationships that are characterized by a high degree of emotional
intimacy and social cohesion with those that are more contractual and find
their basis in the functionally differentiated division of labor characteristic of
contemporary societies.2 In Tonnies (1957), we can see a value-laden concern
about the deformation of community, which results from the spread of the
Alan G. Ingham and Mary G. McDonald
19
industrial order throughout the modern world. This concern about community
deformation, now as then, is not merely intellectual: at the heart of this concern, there is a politics of nostalgia in which visions of the past stand as a critique of present forms of social association. By “visions,” we imply that we
recapture a past that we have not experienced in the form of a desire for what
should be. This recapturing is selective. We bracket off knowledge about the
political-economic organization of societies in which these solidaristic communities were located, and we forget the affectual violence that oftentimes accompanied rather intense and continuous face-to-face social interactions and
the popular cultural productions that resided in such. Nevertheless, when we
now use the concept of community, we do so as a symbol of the “good society”
that the various processes linked to modernization have extirpated. This normative critique of present-day social arrangements also shows up in the work
of Max Weber and Charles Horton Cooley.
Weber (1978) viewed modernity as the thoroughgoing rationalization of
social life. Pessimistically, he envisioned abstract, functional/formal rationality
to be superseding tradition, affect, and custom as the basis for social organization. Capitalism and technobureaucratic organizations would individuate in
ways that threatened the substantive rationality of the individual, leading to
estrangement. Rationalization, emotional detachment, and impersonality
would transform communality—imperatively organized groups would replace
kinships and fraternal bondings. Cooley (1967) primarily focused his critique
of modernity in terms of the impact it was having on the primary group, or
what George Herbert Mead might have called a “circle of significant others”
(Mead, 1934). For Cooley, modernity would extenuate rather than extend
moral standards derived from love, freedom, and justice. Along with Tonnies
and Weber, Cooley viewed modernity as an impoverishment of human relationships: the pecuniary/instrumental nexus turned the subtle and grateful
“being-for-one-another” into a highly schematized, specialized, precise, and
exact mode of existence.
We must take note of the life spans of the theorists acknowledged above.
They were born circa 1860 and died circa 1925. Writing some 50 years later,
Louis Wirth, one of the founding members of the Chicago School of urban sociology, cast a different light on the consequences of modernity. Wirth (1938)
viewed modernity not as a collapse of communal and segmental bonding but as
a determinant in the reformation of the segmental community under a changed
set of social relations. Wirth’s argument was anchored in the concept of xenophobia, or the general aversion to the strange/different. This general aversion to
heterogeneity, anchored in categorical status, was seen by Wirth as replacing the
enforced homogeneity anchored in kith and kin. Echoes of Wirth can be found
in the more recent work of Richard Sennett (1974). The latter also argues that
the overall tendencies of mature capitalism may have deformed the organic
communities of the premodern period, but that, paradoxically, they have
20
SPORT AND COMMUNITY/COMMUNITAS
reformed communality in highly segmented and purified forms—forms that
represent all classes, not just those of the urban industrial classes, such as Wirth
analyzed. While work has become increasing differentiated, our home bases are
firmly rooted in our material, social,3 and cultural capital, and our heterophobias.
These insights about community raise a continuity/discontinuity problem.
On the one hand, there are those who see continuity between the structured,
segmental, communal forms of solidarity of the past and the structured, coerced, or preferred segmental bonding of the present. Presumably, since there is
continuity in the forms of social bonding, there will be continuity in the cultures that segmental bonding creates (see Dunning, 1983). On the other hand,
there are those who view capitalism, particularly industrial capitalism, as a force
for discontinuity and disintegration. Socialized commodity production, rationalized relations of production, the increasing distantiation between spheres of
production and spheres of consumption, the schematization of social administration and planning, and the functional division of labor all combine to form
a distinctively new social order and new relations of social relations. This period of history is referred to as “modernity” or “Fordism” and is now, some
would argue, being replaced by postmodernity, which is linked to a new form of
capitalism, namely, nomad capitalism (see Williams, 1989, p. 124) and flexible
capital accumulation (see Harvey, 1989, and note 1) which, in contemporary
capitalist societies, extenuate the ties between capital and community and,
through outsourcing, destroy the basis of traditional working-class communities and even national working-class cultures and solidarities.
The extent of these transformations (and, importantly, their capacity to
form a distinctive era of postmodernity) is still open to debate. Suffice it to say
that the changes wrought by industrial capitalism do not extinguish the quest
for community (symbolic or real), nor does the postmodern focus on images,
heterogeneity of meaning, and the multiplicity of identity eliminate the quest
(symbolic or real) for homogeneity. What they do—to reverse Durkheim’s
(1933) evolutionary concepts of mechanical and organic solidarity—is eliminate the organic, “can live your whole life in it” forms of community and produce new forms of social solidarities of coerced (for the politically and
materially powerless) or preferential homogeneities.
Additionally, according to Young:
Within the context of capitalism, . . . racism, ethnic chauvinism, and
class devaluation . . . grow partly from a desire for community, that
is, from the desire to understand themselves and from the desire to
be understood as I understand myself. Practically speaking, such
mutual understanding can be approximated only within a homogeneous group that defines itself by common attributes. Such common
identification, however, entails references also to those excluded.
(1990, p. 311)
Alan G. Ingham and Mary G. McDonald
21
From this perspective, “community” suggests both an appeal to the included and
an often unspoken understanding of just who is not a part of our “community.”
The inclusion/exclusion aspects of community have considerable value for
this discussion of representational sport. Historically, sport has existed among
a vast array of cultural and political practices designed to construct boundaries
around particular groups of people—to differentiate between and separate certain “communities” from others. Today’s highly competitive Western sport, for
example, can trace its roots to an English athletic system developed over a century ago. Exclusive clubs and romantic notions of the amateur gentleman were
the class-based and ideological means by which wealthy men prohibited the
working class from competing on the same athletic fields (see Ingham, 1978,
chap. 2; Morford & McIntosh, 1993). This elitist creed was adopted by Pierre
de Coubertin and codified in practice upon the reintroduction of the Olympic
Games in 1896.
The United States witnessed a similar history of class-based exclusionary
practices in its adoption of the sporting forms developed in the English Athletic
Revival (see Ingham, 1978, chap. 2; Ingham & Beamish, 1993). In addition,
sporting practices in the United States have reproduced and reinforced status
differentiations and subcommunity categorical boundaries existing within the
wider culture. One has only to think of the long and sordid history of racial segregation and ethnic discrimination in American sports (see Brooks & Althouse,
1993; Edwards, 1969; Olsen, 1968; Ribalow, 1948, for general overviews). Professional baseball provides the notable example here. African Americans were
once members of the major league baseball teams in the 1890s, yet prevailing
white supremicist ideology forged an unspoken agreement to ban them from the
so-called “national” pastime. From this exclusion, the Negro leagues took on
particular significance within the segregated black “community” until Jackie
Robinson “broke the color barrier” in 1947. From the perspective of the
African-American “communities,” it might be argued that the “breaking of the
color barrier” was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it allowed outstanding
African-American athletes the social mobility that they richly deserved. On the
other hand, the reintegration of African Americans into professional sport allowed whites to claim that sport was a beacon of meritocracy. Despite the presence of African Americans in elite competitive sports and the increasingly large
Latino presence in major league baseball today, structural racism continues to
segregate communities of people of color from whites both in and out of sport.
Recent changes in the microeconomics of professional team sports, for example,
have led to the situation where fewer members of minority groups are able to attend major league sporting events—reintegration on the field recently has been
accompanied by segregation in the “bleachers.”
Just as noteworthy is the recognition that even within status-homogeneous
sub-“communities” (and in the special experiences of communitas, which we discuss later in this chapter), there is and has been one major source of differentiated
22
SPORT AND COMMUNITY/COMMUNITAS
inequality within patriarchal societies: gender. Typically when we talk about the
representational sport and the community problematic, we do so through a privileged male perspective. Indeed, much of what we have to say in this chapter focuses on commercialized elite male sport, which still exists as the dominant
model of representational sport. Feminist scholarship over the last 20 years, however, has not only pointed to the idea that men’s pleasure is women’s work but also
to the idea that sport is only one social institution among others that requires radical gender restructuring both in the production and consumption sides of social
relations and in the meaning of participation in the civic ritual.
Shifting gender relations and the logics of twentieth-century capitalism
have combined to create new and niche markets for professional team sports for
women. The fall of 1996, for example, saw the launching of the American Basketball League, and in the summer of 1997, the Women’s National Basketball
Association (WNBA) games premiered. Yet despite these and other challenges,
representational sport is largely overdetermined by its masculinist history. That
representational sport is largely a male preserve is suggested by overwhelming
cultural, political, media, and economic support. Indeed, Canadian sport sociologist and political activist Bruce Kidd (1990, p. 32) refers to the Toronto
Skydome as the “men’s cultural center.” Because of the efforts of male politicians (although some women mayors have been complicitous, e.g., Roxanne
Qualls of Cincinnati) infamous for their hostility to feminist causes, public
funds and tax abatements have been used to create a stage for male team games.
Thus male power is legitimated and maintained as public and private investments in stadia construction (especially single-purpose facilities that give sport
team owners more political and economic leverage over city officials than do
their domed counterparts) prevent alternative uses of these resources that
might redress the culturally created disadvantages that women endure. Recognition of this masculinist agenda exposes even seemingly homogeneous, representational sporting “communities” as being internally stratified.
These examples reveal that the forces of later twentieth-century capitalism
enable and intertwine with historically forged and increasingly complex social
relations. What also has happened is that internally stratified, traditional caste,
and class-based communities exist alongside of and in most cases have been
substantially marginalized by prestige-based communities in which consumption relations rather than production relations form the basis of social approbation. Nowhere is this more evident than in U.S. urban/metropolitan spaces,
given the dramatic shifts in the economy since the 1970s.
Declining markets, unemployment, the growth of part-time positions
with few benefits, deindustrialization, and globalization have all exerted enormous burdens on the financial viability of cities and their inhabitants. Since
1972, the feminization of poverty, plant closings, and neoconservative political
agendas have contributed to the growing number of urban poor and to a shifting composition of the urban poor population. Indeed, female heads of house-
Alan G. Ingham and Mary G. McDonald
23
holds, racial minorities, and children now form a substantial proportion of
those living in urban poverty.
Especially in the 1980s and 1990s, attempts to economically revitalize
urban “communities” have produced new forms of construction and strategies
of legitimation. In the (post) Fordist American city, those with capital have assisted in creating fresh consumer “communities” by encouraging the consumption of events, spectacles, history, and festivals (Harvey, 1989).
As a component of what can be identified as relationally abstract consumption “communities,” representational sport exists as one of a series of
lifestyle practices and amusement choices designed to distinguish between
groups of people. As media technologies expand and as the forces of globalization escalate, status and a sense of belongingness are increasingly gained by
partaking in the good life as proffered and encouraged by producers of the
preferred products and entertainment. Here, consumption-based prestige is
not the prerogative of just the elites, but rather it is sought in all strata and social groupings (Goode, 1978). Those with wealth can literally embody the
fashionable and engage in fancy milling: they are “Where the action is” (see
Goffman, 1967, p. 197). Those with less money are only able to participate in
these consumer “communities” in varying degrees. Many are left to participate
vicariously—in their wish-fulfilling dreams or as actors in the sideshows occurring in the bleachers or stands and accompanying the main events. Regardless, prestige communities require punctilious conformity (see Goode,
1978) in lifestyle and thus reinforce the xenophobic impulse.
Surveillance of and sensitivity to boundary lead to the defense of boundary in a way that encourages internal purification, as is evidenced in status-differentiated enclaves of lifestyle. Also, this differentiated and status-based
cultural power is reinforced by state and substate policies in the allocation of
the amenity infrastructures of collective consumption. This transformation in
the relations of social relations facilitates the demarcation between the irreplaceable and the expendable —the wanted and the unwanted, respectively.
This demarcation is especially visible in the built environments of amenity infrastuctures—both in where and what is built, in the internal, social ecology of
the structures themselves, and in the pricing of access to such amenities. As
noted previously, many stadia have been built under the guise of urban renewal,
yet those living in closest proximity to them cannot afford the price of admission. Ironically, in the case of the imposition of regressive taxes (e.g., the use
of sales taxes) to fund such stadium construction, it is also the poor who bear a
disproportionate burden of paying for such facilities. Moreover, tax abatements
and the creation of what are tantamount to tax-free zones to entice corporate
investments create shortfalls in funding for services that the poor desperately
need—education, urban renewal, sewer and water provision, and public safety.
Xenophobia causes the concept of the popular to have mixed meanings—
popular as in everyone likes it; popular as in, because everyone likes it, it must
24
SPORT AND COMMUNITY/COMMUNITAS
be inferior. Status xenophobia also has contradictions in cultural politics.
Often, from an elitist perspective, “we” and “them” can articulate in the popular
in various ways: we should educate them; we need them or their taxes to get
what we want (a new center for the fine arts or a new stadium in which to locate our luxury boxes and our hopes for more capitalist investment in a big
league city), and we need them to buy into our “community” creations and our
imagined “community” to preserve harmony in status relations which, in reality, are both culturally patronizing and economically exploitative. This is the
unexplored or dark side of the concept of “community”—its cultural and political abuse. In contemporary society, the economically and politically powerful
with access to important signifying systems such as the media are able to mobilize the politics of nostalgia, drawing upon romanticized versions of community, just as they recreate enticing images of community in order to attract
private and public investments. Yet it is doubtful that the poorest in a given
urban space will benefit significantly, if at all, from these expenditures. Indeed,
this shift in economic content and form has, in many cases, exacerbated poverty
and status differentials.
There is more to this dark side of a concept that is unusual among the
terms of political vocabulary in being the one term that has never been used in
a negative sense: it is the linkage of a habit of mutual obligation to the possibility of exploitation. As Raymond Williams expressed the case:
If you have the sense that you have this kind of native duty to others,
it can expose you very cruelly within a system of the conscious exploitation of labor. And it is for a long time a very powerful appeal,
one that it is still repeatedly used in politics, that you have this kind of
almost absolute obligation to the “community,” that the assertion of
interest against it is merely selfish. (1989, p. 114)
Thus the use of the concept of “community” becomes perverse when the interests of domination are concealed in the concept, and when opposition to these
interests is designated as selfish, that is, when city managers, in their role of entrepreneurs of the public interest and speaking on behalf of the community as
a whole, repress and exploit communities of locality in the interests of the
dominant corporate groups.
The capacity for concerted action among the rich and powerful is nowhere
better exemplified than in their attempts to persuade ordinary citizens to give
up some of their hard-earned dollars (in the form of taxes) to subsidize their
projects. These projects are wide ranging, including the building of such temples of consumption such as aquariums, museums of history, convention sites,
banks, and shopping areas. Notably, with regard to sport, the Christian Science
Monitor reports:
Alan G. Ingham and Mary G. McDonald
25
More than a third of the 113 teams in the four [U.S.] major-league
sports (baseball, football, basketball, and hockey) are seeking to
change their facilities, according to a report from Fitch Investors Service. In almost all other cases, the team owners are trying to force local
and state governments to come up with all or much of the funding for
a new facility. (February 2, 1996, p. 3:3)
From the perspective of the exploited soccer fan, Hornby (1992, p. 150)
sums up the case nicely: “In the end I learned, from this period more than any
other in my footballing history, that it simply doesn’t matter to me how bad
things get, that results have nothing to do with anything. . . . For us, the consumption is all; the quality of the product is immaterial.” The chains of loyalty
are precisely what predatory capitalism has in mind when its representatives
appeal to the bonds of “community” to make their decisive interventions into
the culture of the “community as a whole.” Yet is there a mighty contradiction
here? Under conditions of monopoly provision (conditions that prevail for
most league sports and other professional tournaments), providers raise ticket
prices and demand public subsidies (in the United States, cities may even subsidize franchises for low attendance at the gate), even after losing seasons.
Thus they are beginning to price out the very fandoms or subcommunities
that provide them with continuous support and leave themselves prey to the
new consumerist, identity-fickle audience. They may be, in this regard, just
“riding a wave.” After all, in a culture committed to differentiation and distinction, tastes and lifestyle choices are not static: today’s private seat license or
box seats or luxury box at the stadium may give way to tomorrow’s hot new
consumer option.
While we have noted the period during which the critiques of industrial
society arose and have offered brief discussions of the problematic of community in contemporary urban spaces, we have not considered the concept of time
per se. After all, “communities” are not only spatial, they are temporal. In a
sense, “community” represents a temporal commitment—without the commitment to making and reproducing “community,” it is doubtful that community,
in the modern sense, could exist. This caveat once again moves us away from
the idealized and normative definitions of community that have served to totalize and detemporalize social relations by positing a dichotomy between the
seemingly authentic communities of yesteryear and the inauthentic communities of late-twentieth-century capitalism. With Young (1990), we challenge
this ahistoricity and suggest that such a conceptualization obscures the contradictions and negates the possibilities of challenging existing social relations
within existing consumer “communities.” There is too much traditional populism at the heart of this argument and insufficient consideration for new and
“media-ated” forms of populism (e.g., communication webs on the Internet).
26
SPORT AND COMMUNITY/COMMUNITAS
ON COMMUNITAS
In his The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Victor Turner (1969,
chap. 4) introduced the concept of communitas—a special experience during
which individuals are able to rise above those structures that materially and
normatively regulate their daily lives and that unite people across the boundaries of structure, rank, and socioeconomic status (see also Turner, 1974; Harding, 1983). Turner (1969, p. 132) distinguishes three forms of communitas: (a)
the spontaneous and short lived; (b) the ideological affirmation of spontaneous
communitas; and (c) the normative, subcultural attempt to maintain the relationships of spontaneous communitas on a more permanent basis. For Turner
(1974, pp. 84–86), the forces of modernity have eroded communitas except at
the subcommunity or the fragmented, segmental, categoric levels of sociality.
This assertion requires some distinction between the permanent and the ideological. While we might agree with Turner that the conditions giving rise to
permanent communitas have long since passed, we note that contemporary social relations present opportunities for the concept of “community,” in the form
of communitas, to be the object of much ideological work. Attention must
focus on the concept of civic ritual.
The symbolism (representations) associated with rituals (in the form of festivals, public spectacles, and other cultural performances) has been of interest
to anthropologists, sociologists, folklorists, and historians. Building on the
work of Emile Durkheim, Franz Boas and Durkheim’s student, Marcel Mauss,
developed common themes such as the relation between ritual and identity, between ritual and the establishment of links between individuals and their subcommunities, and between ritual and the submersion of the subcommunities
into a community as a whole. That the symbolism of ritual can induce communal bonding has been promoted by Turner (1974); that symbols per se can
promote the imagination of community has been argued by Anthony Cohen
(1985). Previously we distinguished between permanent and ideological communitas. A second distinction that can be inferred is that of structural versus
symbolic communitas. We make no distinction between these distinctions, for
much of representation concerning communitas takes symbolically ideological
forms that are made in reference to position in social structures. We note that
ideological work is being used increasingly (in television and advertising) to
symbolically camouflage the lack of genuine structural reform.
Camouflage (opacity in inequality) is inherent in civic ritual, and the persistent use of civic rituals casts doubt on Turner’s assertion that communitas is
present only at the subcommunity level of social relations. If communitas were
to be present only at subcommunity levels, then the commitments by civic leaders to use civic rituals as vehicles for its regeneration would have no meaning or
function—a civic ritual would be a waste of time, money, and energy. Thus we
assert that while structural communitas has eroded in its meaningful value,
Alan G. Ingham and Mary G. McDonald
27
there is plenty of evidence to suggest that there is a tremendous amount of ideological effort to promote and regenerate communitas under a changed (structural and cultural) set of circumstances. Here it is important to understand the
civic in the civic ritual. Ingham, Howell, and Schilperoort (1987) needed a term
that reflected changes in the relationship between the state and civil society as
reproduced in the contemporary use of ritual, especially those serial civic rituals associated with league sporting events. The tremendous articulation between the state and civil society achieved under Fordist political economy
meant that classical distinction between the public and private sectors had become hard to sustain. Given the interpenetration of the state and civil society,
especially in the production of rituals, the concept of civic ritual had to be invented. Civic ritual thus was seen by Ingham et al. as requiring the combined
resources (social and economic capitals) of both the state (or substate) and private capital, and as a combination of the hegemonic interests of public officials
and the capitalist business class with the view to making these hegemonic interests and the situated interests of subordinate groups and communities into
a conjoint articulation or an unequal complementarity (see Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, & Roberts, 1978, p. 156; Sumner, 1979, p. 295).
SPORT AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF COMMUNITAS
One of the key arguments made in the Ingham et al. (1987) publication was
that representational sport has moved historically from social to abstract economic space, thus making it difficult for sport to be instrumental in the creation
of an empowering local “community.” The abstract spatiality of representational sport was attributed to changes in the value-creating capacities of representational sport—from early forms of commercialism to current forms of
monopoly in the consumer marketplace and monopsony in the labor market
place. Several concepts have been used to describe this change, including valorization, commodification, and professionalization. One of the consequences
combining these processes is that of the changing relations between producer
and consumer groups, especially the disenfranchising of ordinary people in the
determination of what would be popular.
Now we do not wish to fall prey to the very politics of nostalgia that we
have been critiquing all along: of course, there has never been full participation
in the cultural formation called “community,” nor has there been equal access to
representational sport “communities.” Still, following Clarke and Critcher
(1985, pp. 95–97), a case can be made that the audience of professional sports
has been transformed from one that had an active, membership-style commitment to the club into one that, even if it could not enjoy the status of membership, did at least expect a customer’s stake in the club in the form of a
producer-consumer contract. Currently denied the active commitment of
28
SPORT AND COMMUNITY/COMMUNITAS
membership and the informal contract between producer and consumer, the
sport’s audience is reduced to a dependency upon monopolistic sources of supply to which there are no viable alternatives and to a dependency that limits the
audience to only one sanction against displeasure—the choice of not to buy.
The crucial question is whether representational sport remains an effective
vehicle for the manufacturing of “community,” or whether it can merely serve
momentarily in the generation of spontaneous communitas. We argue for the
latter. The die-hard fan may be there no matter what, but spontaneous communitas requires something above the mundane —a league championship or
equivalent. Only the diehard can be satisfied with miserable serial civic rituals—indeed, it may be that audience subcommunities are generated from misery loves company conditions. Only the exceptional can provoke spontaneous
communitas. But spontaneous communitas is fleeting and cannot form the
basis for community per se. Community involves time and social commitment,
and the investment of social capital. Community, in the utopian sense, involves
trust and obligation, and representational sport, especially in North America,
provides no basis for such. Here franchise relocations are frequent, and the
threat of relocation plays a large role in the blackmailing of urban centers with
regard to stadium improvements (see Euchner, 1993; Ingham, et al., 1987;
Johnson, 1978, 1983, 1985, 1986; Richmond, 1993; Schimmel, Ingham, &
Howell, 1993).
Thus another consequence of the transformation of sport from social to
abstract economic space is in the elevation of surplus and exchange values over
use-values. This confrontation between abstract surplus and exchange value definitions and social use-value definitions of sport and sporting space may lie at
the heart of the private/public, capital/community contradiction that civic ideologies of urban boosterism (“We are a major league city, so invest here!”),
trickle-down effects (sport franchises create jobs—albeit, we note, low-paying,
part-time jobs with no health insurance or pensions), and the magical creation
of community as a whole seek to mystify. Just as a class formation must be seen
in terms of a founding moment, a possible deforming moment, as well as possible reforming moments or periods (see Therborn, 1980, p. 93), so too should
we view “community.” And in this viewing we should remember one fundamental relation between capital and “community.” It is that economic capital is
mobile; geophysical communities as a whole4 (as social and cultural capitals) are
not (Hill, 1983, pp. 80–125). In the United States, we also can state that sport
franchises are mobile, while urban populations are not. Thus the chicken and
the egg question for cities is: do “communities” deform and franchises leave, or
do franchises leave and assist in the “community” deformation process? Is this
question as relevant now as it was when Ingham et al. (1987) asked it in 1984?
Is it now the case in the United States that, given the competition between
cities for sport franchises, there will always be an incentive for relocation as
long as the sport has an effective demand (see Schimmel et al., 1993)? If this is
Alan G. Ingham and Mary G. McDonald
29
the scenario, then “communities” will be forever blackmailed into meeting the
sport capitalists’ and public entrepreneurs’ demands. It matters little whether
this involves major league teams or the public subsidization of world-scale
events (e.g., the Olympic Games). The major issue for the dominant classes in
contemporary society is that hegemony is incredibly fragile. Ideology work is
more important than ever. The magical recovery of “community” or the manufacturing of “communitas” is a significant component of this work. With capitalist tennis star Andre Agassi (the Canon commercials), we might be tempted
to conclude that “image is everything.” Yet because we can deconstruct images
and the politics involved in them, any magical “community” will soon appear
fictitious. A final thought is needed concerning the articulation between community and communitas. It is one involving history.
In traditional preindustrial communities, a case might be made that without a geophysical community there could be no communitas. In such relational
configurations, community was both the being at one with others and where
“community” happened (see Turner, 1969, pp. 126–127). In contemporary society, there may be instances of spontaneous communitas in conditions of exceptional “happenings” (e.g., earthquakes and floods), but for the most part
communitas has become rather orchestrated in the sense that the limbic and
the ideological are combined, with the former being subsumed under the latter.
Parades and celebrations are now organized. Communitas now is absorbed by
civic rituals. But are the limbic and the liminal completely contained?
In our attempt to answer this question, we combine the themes of this
chapter with help from Richard Sennett’s (1990) The Conscience of the Eye: The
Design and Social Life of Cities. Here Sennett (p. xii) observes that “the spaces
full of people in the modern city are either spaces limited to and carefully orchestrating consumption, like the shopping mall, or spaces limited to and carefully orchestrating the experience of tourism.” Presumed dangerous spaces, first
walled off by train tracks, now are walled off by highways. Spaces once social
are now neutralized. The environment is built rather than peopled. Thus the
inner city and its central business district are, with the notable exceptions of
areas containing the mobility frozen poor, “socially dead” once the business day
ends, or when there are no tourist events to attract those who have fled city life.
The construction of downtown amenity infrastructures do re-people a city, but
only for the times when they are open. Thus on a typical weekend, only the
tourists and the mobility frozen—strangers to each other in most respects—
populate the downtown public spaces.
Civic rituals, such as the celebration of a major league championship, involve both the mobility frozen and the tourist. The former are there; the latter visit. Sometimes such orchestrated celebrations of “communitas” turn ugly.
A major league championship celebration turns violent and vandalistic. To return to previous thoughts, we offer the following as a repudiation of ideological attempts to create the “community as a whole” through orchestrated
30
SPORT AND COMMUNITY/COMMUNITAS
“communitas.” A celebratory crowd is not homogeneous. Those who unwillingly subsidize the building of amenity infrastructures and those who benefit
from these subsidies may join with the tourist and the mobility frozen. Also in
the crowd will be those who willingly subsidize professional sport both
through taxation and paid attendance at the live event. In the celebratory
crowd, therefore, there are those who maintain an, albeit, fictional belief that
they somehow are investors in the city and all that the city stands for. There
are those for whom the idea that they “own” the city makes no real sense and
for whom a degraded urban existence shouts out “if the city stands for something, it does not stand for or by me.” For those who subsidize without a return on their investment or who stand at the margins of business and tourist
life, the orchestrated celebration of communitas may be ironic indeed. Under
such socially stratified and differentiated circumstances, why would we be surprised that the attempts at communitas go awry, especially when the orchestrated civic ritual takes place in routinely neutral or “socially dead”
space —tunnels of glass and concrete? In the articulation between representational sports and their “communities,” we should be aware of the distinction,
made by Turner, between communitas anchored in the liminalities of the marginalized and disenfranchised and structured communitas, in the form of civic
rituals, orchestrated for the dominant by the dominant. Civic rituals, as representations of the extraordinary, are a far cry from everyday life and reveal all of
the latter’s contradictions. Presumed to be popular, in all of its meanings, they
serve to further distinguish between the popular and the dominant—those
who confront normal human misery on a daily basis, and those who, in the
guise of working for the “community as a whole,” add to it.
NOTES
1. In recreational sports (and we include the consumption of representational
sport as recreational), one must assume that social differentiation and social stratification determine who does what, with whom, at what time, and in what spaces. After
all, in recreational sports, we are forced to pay for our participation. However, when
one looks at recreational sports as ordinary or popular participatory cultures, the longterm trend toward managerialism (the corporate plan, the right to manage) has the
fundamental impact of decontextualizing our participation in terms of place as a crucial element in the bonding process and in the reproduction of community (see
Williams, 1989, p. 242). Moreover, managerialism in the form of nationalized, cultural paternalism bulldozes the whole intricate structures of local communities in the
name of a postulated universality of cultural values (see Bauman, 1987, p. 60). Managerialism, coupled with the commodification of recreational spaces, represents the
redeployment of social power in the sense of the right to initiative and control over
time and space (see Bauman, 1987, p. 67; Ingham & Hardy, 1984). In this regard,
both public and private “community” recreational centers become estranged from their
Alan G. Ingham and Mary G. McDonald
31
roots in locality—they may serve the “community,” but they do not promote its
intrinsic value.
2. There are many descriptors being used to label contemporary occidental societies. Some talk about postmodern, others late capitalist, or postcapitalist, postindustrial,
or high modern. We reject the notions of postcapitalist and postindustrial, because capitalism is alive and kicking, although in new formations, and because there remains an
industrial base to capitalist production, even if much of this production is beginning to
be centered in so-called underdeveloped nations. The distinction between high modern
and postmodern lies in the continuity/discontinuity debate. For those who accept the
argument that there is continuity between the Fordist (industrial capitalist) and
post–Fordist (flexible capitalist accumulation) conjunctures, then high modern is an apt
term to describe reformed political economies. For those who see discontinuity, especially in cultural production, between the two, then postmodern is more appropriate. We
argue that there is continuity in both political economy and in its hegemonic institutions. However, we do note that there is discontinuity in popular cultural productions,
but that this has not yet overdetermined the political-economic process: it forms the
basis of a reactionary bourgeois angst, as evidenced in the moral rhetoric of conservative
politicians. Lacking a good descriptor, we shall use the concept of contemporary.
3. Social capital has been defined as “features of social organization,” such as networks, values, and social trust, which facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual
benefit. It involves responsibility for and obligation to others. It is the social effort and
human care that have been invested in the making of community (see Putnam, 1995,
p. 67; Williams, 1989, pp. 123–124).
4. Here we have used commmunity as a whole, because we recognize that people
do migrate from one residential location to another as a result of increased or decreased
affluence. To use a phrase of Goode’s (albeit, out of context), there is a principle of
homogamy that often contours “community” preference.
REFERENCES
Bauman, Z. (1987). Legislators and interpreters. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Brooks, D., & Althouse, R. (Eds.). (1993). Racism in college athletics: The African-American athlete’s experience. Morgantown: Fitness Technologies.
Clarke, J., & Critcher, C. (1985). The devil makes work: Leisure in capitalist Britain.
Houndsmills: Macmillan.
Cohen, A. (1985). The symbolic construction of community. Chichester: Ellis Horwood
and Tavistock.
Cooley, C. (1967). Social organization. New York: Schocken.
Dunning, E. (1983). Social bonding and violence in sport: A theoretical-empirical
analysis. In J. Goldstein (Ed.), Sports violence (pp. 129-146). New York: SpringerVerlag.
Durkheim, E. (1933). The division of labor in society. New York: Free Press.
32
SPORT AND COMMUNITY/COMMUNITAS
Durkheim, E. (1965). Elementary forms of religious life. New York: Free Press.
Edwards, H. (1969). The revolt of the black athlete. New York: The Free Press.
Euchner, C. (1993). Playing the field: Why sports teams move and cities fight to keep them.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction ritual: Essays on face-to-face behavior. Garden City, NY:
Anchor Books.
Goode, W. (1978). The celebration of heroes. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J., & Roberts, B. (1978). Policing the crisis:
Mugging, the state and law and order. London: Macmillan.
Harding, R. (1983). Ritual in recent criticism: The elusive sense of community. Modern
Language Association, 98, 846–862.
Harvey, D. (1989). The condition of postmodernity. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Hill, R. (1983). Crisis in the Motor City: The politics of economic development in
Detroit. In S. Fainstain et al. (Eds.), Restructuring the city (pp. 80–125). New York:
Longman.
Hornby, N. (1992). Fever pitch. New York: Penguin Books.
Ingham, A. (1978). American sport in transition: The maturation of industrial capitalism
and its impact upon sport. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Ingham, A., & Beamish, R. (1993). The industrialization of the United States and the
bourgeoisification of American sport. In E. Dunning, J. Maguire, & R. Pearton
(Eds.), The sports process: A comparative and developmental approach (pp. 169–206).
Champaign: Human Kinetics.
Ingham, A., & Hardy, S. (1984). Sport: Structuration, subjugation, and hegemony. Theory, Culture & Society, 2, 85–103.
Ingham, A., Howell, J., & Schilperoort, T. (1987). Professional sport and community:
A review and exegesis. Exercise and Sport Sciences Reviews, 15, 427–465.
Jhally, S. (1989). Cultural studies and the sports/media complex. In L. Wenner (Ed.),
Sport, media and society (pp. 70–93). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Johnson, A. (1978). Public sports policy: An introduction. American Behavioral Scientist,
21(3), 319–344.
Johnson, A. (1983). Municipal administration and the sport franchise relocation issue.
Public Administration Review, 43, 519–528.
Johnson, A. (1985). The professional sport franchise relocation issue. In J. Frey and
A. Johnson (Eds.), Government and sports: Public policy issues (pp. 64–83). Totowa, NJ:
Rowman and Allanheld.
Johnson, A. (1986). Economic and policy implications of hosting sports franchises:
Lessons from Baltimore. Urban Affairs Quarterly, 2, 411–433.
Kidd, B. (1990). The men’s cultural center: Sport and the dynamic of women’s oppression/men’s repression. In M. Messner & D. Sabo (Eds.), Sport, men and the gender
order (pp. 31–44). Champaign: Human Kinetics.
Alan G. Ingham and Mary G. McDonald
33
Lewis, L. (1992). Adoring audience: Fan culture and popular media. London: Routledge.
Loy, J. (1968). The nature of sport: A definitional effort. Quest, 10, 1–15.
Mead, G. (1934). Mind, self, and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Morford, R., & McIntosh, M. (1993). Sport and the Victorian gentleman. In A. Ingham & J. Loy (Eds.), Sport in social development: Traditions, transitions, and transformations (pp. 51–76). Champaign: Human Kinetics.
Olsen, J. (1968). The black athlete: A shameful story. New York: Time-Life.
Putnam, R. (1995). Bowling alone: America’s declining social capital. Journal of Democracy, 1, 65–78.
Ribalow, H. (1948). The Jew in American sports. New York: Bloch.
Richmond, P. (1993). Ballpark: Camden Yards and the building of an American dream.
New York: Simon and Schuster.
Schimmel, K., Ingham, A., and Howell, J. (1993). Professional team sport and the
American city: Urban politics and franchise relocations. In A. Ingham and J. Loy
(Eds.), Sport in social development: Traditions, transitions, and transformations (pp.
211–244). Champaign: Human Kinetics.
Sennett, R. (1974). The fall of public man. New York: Vintage Books.
Sennett, R. (1990). The conscience of the eye: The design and social life of cities. New York:
W. W. Norton.
Sumner, C. (1979). Reading ideologies: An investigation into the Marxist theory of ideology
and law. London: Academic Press.
Therborn, G. (1980). The ideology of power and the power of ideology. London: New Left
Books.
Tonnies, F. (1957). Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.
Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Chicago: Aldine.
Turner, V. (1974). Dramas, fields, and metaphors: Symbolic action in human society. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.
Weber, M. (1978). Economy and society (G. Roth & C. Wittich, Eds.). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Williams, R. (1989). Resources of hope. London: Verso.
Wirth, L. (1938). Urbanism as a way of life. American Journal of Sociology, 44, 1–24.
Young, I. (1990). The ideal of community and the politics of difference. In L. Nicholson (Ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism. New York: Routledge.